ظهور غوبلز في طهران

Since the launch of the American-Israeli military operations on February 28, Iran decided to target the Gulf countries and Jordan with most of its missiles and drones, seeking refuge in God and directing only a small portion of its fire towards U.S. and Tel Aviv interests.

There are ten formulations used to clarify the rationale behind attacking the Gulf, some of which address well-known facts that no one denies, such as "the presence of American and Western bases in the Gulf." These are present and publicly announced in the media through agreements, but this hypothesis is misleading; it assumes that action is necessary as long as the bases exist, some of which date back to the 1950s, by the way. It also deliberately ignores the statements from Gulf countries rejecting the use of their territories by the United States to strike Iran.

Some are even more absurd, considering the functional partnership as mentioned, such as "targeting the base due to its interception of Iranian missiles." Many of these statements discuss generalities without referencing the origin of the strikes, including "a response to the source of American aggression" and "the inherent right to self-defense," in a legal framing of Article 51 of the UN Charter.

The most absurd of these statements was made by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on March 2, where he said: "We harbor no animosity towards the Gulf countries... this is not an attack on those countries." This statement was echoed in a different form by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, thus creating a narrative that reinforces the Iranian story with varying angles justifying the attacks on Gulf countries. For those familiar with Persian newspapers, many of the statements on this topic were primarily for internal use.

Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that the Iranian narrative is correct and try to explore how Iran substantiated these claims. Iran has fundamentally lost many of its radars and air defense capabilities during the strikes of the past year and the initial strikes this year. Moscow has delayed delivering the S-400 over the years, and Tehran criticized Moscow at that time for granting these capabilities to other regional parties, but of course, it did provide the S-300 and other missile assistance.

However, this weakness in air defense capabilities does not imply complete intelligence blindness; there are passive sensors (ESM/SIGINT) that are difficult to target because they do not emit signals, but they alert you to threats without pinpointing the aircraft's launch location. Last May, the United States imposed sanctions on entities, including satellite companies like EarthEye. On the other hand, if Iran relies on images from open sources that any analyst can access, its information is based on the presence of aircraft, not on the targeting itself.

Even those images suffer from two flaws; first, any aircraft in a fortified underground shelter or hangar will naturally not be visible in satellite images. The other point to consider is that images from these sites are updated every 24 hours, while the aerial mission for strikes takes between 4 to 12 hours at most, meaning that the aircraft could complete its mission and return, and the images would still show it in its place.

Of course, the U.S. government requested sites like Planet Labs and Vantor to suspend their images in the region, which means that even this capability has been stripped from Iran. If we track thermal imaging, we find it difficult to search open sources for any means that provides updates in less than 3 hours from the occurrence of damage, and general thermal imaging cannot detect the launch of an aircraft at all, unlike missiles, for example.

Thus, the logical connection between the origin of the attack, or what is called in Persian "Mabda," is not available. Not to mention that attack aircraft naturally follow a winding path for several reasons, including avoiding air defenses if they exist. This leaves us with the last avenue for analyzing the source of the attacks, which is the munitions. The first thing that refutes the hypothesis of the Gulf countries' role is the heavy munitions from stealth aircraft, which are stationed at Diego Garcia and not in the Gulf.

Even the refueling routes are publicly announced as occurring via aircraft stationed in Israel and from Fairford, and from carriers in the Mediterranean, but Israel, of course, has not been targeted at all by Tehran in recent months.

In the absence of Iranian capability to establish this precise link between origin and target given the available technologies, and the absence of targeting American and Israeli aircraft carriers, it becomes clear that striking the Gulf countries primarily aims to galvanize the hungry street by suggesting that we are at war, which naturally calls for a reaction. Additionally, it aims to raise the costs of transportation, insurance, and oil prices, hoping to create economic pressure that provides the Revolutionary Guard with a lifeline.

Iran struck all six Gulf Cooperation Council countries within the first 48 hours of February 28. There is no intelligence system in the world that can accomplish damage assessments and reverse tracking of fire sources within this timeframe. In summary, the strike preceded the inference and is not a result of it, unless we are quoting Goebbels, the propaganda minister during Hitler's regime.